X-posing the Fallen Individual

 

X in EXPAND.

If spacious stillness is missing, the relationship will be dominated  by the mind and can easily be taken over by problems and conflict. If stillness is there, it can contain anything.   Eckard Tolle

Once you have a sense of focus, the Heart-drama will require you to set an intention. In other words, it is important to consider specifically where you wish to go and what you wish to gain. I recommend you start by giving a title to the Work. If this was a story, what would you name it?

Let that become your conscious contract with your Inspired Self, essentially committing to a particular inquiry.

At some point you may choose to change focus and direction, but, if you feel a pull to do that, before you veer off, you will benefit from a further moment of reflection. Are you shifting focus because a better path has come to mind? Are you intuitively following what has been revealed into a deeper inquiry? Or are you going with simple resistance and choosing what is emotionally safer? Are you distracted, maybe?

Regulating

An intuitively empathic therapist attunes to and resonates with a patient’s affective state, thereby cocreating with the patient a context in which the clinician can act as a regulator of the patient’s physiology. Allan Schore

Helping the Protagonist of a psychodrama regulate their emotional state is a function of the Director who listens intuitively, empathically, who attunes and resonates to all the voices of resistance, the defenses, and the characters that are afraid of digging too deep, exposing too much. In a Heart-drama, you act as your own Director, so it is important to consider how you will regulate yourself during this process of unveiling. I suggest you give yourself permission to stop at any time. Interrupt the process by stepping away, calling a friend, walking in nature, journaling, watching a video, taking time to chill. You may also want to set a time limit on any given reflection. Fifteen minutes perhaps. Tolerate only what you can tolerate.

When treating trauma, Peter Levine advises “pendulation.” So too in Heart-drama work. We go in and we step away, a form of titrating the experience, so we can stay present in the room and do the Work we need to do. Take time to breathe and exhale fully. Step back. Especially if you have experienced difficult realizations, you can take a moment, announce, “I love myself. Even though I had to hide myself and my thoughts when I was a child, I can be open and love myself.” Say it aloud repeatedly until you hear it. “Even though this happened to me (fill in the blank) I can do what is right for me and I can love myself now.”

A Cast of Characters

With perseverance, your inquiry you will meet the central hurdles to freedom. You will certainly encounter things beyond what the cognitive mind knows. In a Psychodrama Moreno called whatever shows up on stage auxiliary-egos.  Don’t think this means they are extraneous, incidental or accidental actors. Ego energies are present for some purpose even if the why is not clear at first. Since all Barriers are expressions of activated Abnormal energies, Pain and Self-deception, though you may have very tender and joyful meetings in your drama, there will also be difficulties and distortions ahead. Expect this. Prepare yourself.

Engaging in contemplative practice is not a passive process. We must actively encounter what Inspiration lays out in front of us. We might see Barriers as our inner troubled characters or outer obstacles. We may experience Overwhelm that we have tried to push through until it became an Exhausting Monster haunting us, or we encounter beliefs that have outlived their usefulness, or dehumanizing rules we have learned to follow that we might call Expectations, Family Demands, or extraordinary capacities we call Talents that have blocked the sun, diminishing other important but less “impressive” aspects of our life, sabotaging states of mind, invalidating subpersonalities, patterns stopping us from letting go or relinquishing commitments that have become roadblocks.

We may recognize human capacities are split along gender lines, and we exist in a culture that shames us if we fall outside the roles. We see males disowning their caring impulses and women losing their voice.  We may find Barriers representing traumas or illness, car-accidents, death, war, insults and injury, a marital collapse or career demands, concerns of getting old, being too young, etc.

We may encounter Barriers in life that seem more abstract.  We may notice existential worries, multigenerational burdens, or spiritual struggles. If there is a central rule to follow in our inquiry, it is that we must allow ourselves to approach whatever is on stage.

Since it would be impossible and confusing to try to list every possible shape Barriers may inhabit, I depict them here as typical personalities or mammals, as metaphors, archetypal figures and motifs that I have painted and pondered. I think this is a relatable approach as many of us are drawn to and can relate to animal portrayals depicting human (or inhumane) qualities.

To clarify, Barriers are usually embedded in the focus that we have chosen at the start. So, for example, in a family system we may find a Burdened Child stuck in a cage, with a Destroyer banging on the outside to terrorize (heartless and pathological), while an Addict Mother is making ineffective whimpering noises, gazing into the cage, reaching out a hand to comfort her child but not quite touching her. In short, we start with the focus and begin to unveil the Barriers within that context and configuration, and we seek to identify collusions, loyalties, antagonisms and/or absolute disdain, etcetera, between them.

Call them Aliens?

Remember our neuro-gravitational pulls. As energies they can animate characters in us (Inside-out) and in our external worlds (Upside-down). They can pull us into Abnormal delusions or con us into taking Self-deceptive actions or drown us in Pain. Perhaps we have dissociated from the worst that happened to us, or we have a pattern of pretending these forces are benign or we hold only moments when characters that are Working for Power or Playing at Power seemed most generous or open, denying what is True. They weren’t always that way….I don’t want to criticize them. I want to be loving. It’s disrespectful to be angry. They meant well.

It is potentially dangerous to use your imagination for an active inquiry in order to just confirm some wishful thinking or to give yourself permission to forgive the unforgivable or to dismiss or forget what needs to be remembered. This is not an excuse to childishly blame and to be critical, but X-posing does require rigorous honesty, the willingness to recognize and discern the people (parts of people), places and events that have had, and maybe still do have, accidentally or on purpose, intentionally or not, a harmful impact on your beautiful spirit.

When Barriers take the form of inner or outer personalities that we think we know, we can lose sight of their dangerousness. Rather than using real names, it can be helpful to call the characters on our stage something exotic and avoid giving labels that portray them as suffering beings that should elicit our sympathy and loyalty, or victims who just need to be understood.

I would encourage you to notice that Fallen energies are always in some form of battle. They can’t believe they have to fight with you, or they can’t believe what you have done to them, or they may express depression, anxiety, immobility in their suffering, but they cannot find relief. There is no solution. Always, never, everyone, nobody. They have tried everything. It is always this way.  They can’t trust you. You have wounded them because you are imperfect. You inflict pain. Or you will never be able to help. You must, should, have-to.

But don’t take their egoic battle cry personally. Though they try to make it personal, this is not about you. They are critical because they are stuck in the past or maybe in an imagined future where they are injured. We rightly call them aliens because they do not live embodied on Earth. They know nothing about Inspiration. And they will invade our present world, dismissing Loving-Playfulness, Loving-Work, Powerful Work, and Powerful-Play, potentially robbing you of spontaneity and intuition, ferrying you away from creative states to a planet always engaged in warfare.

In my Prelude I hoped to suggest my dissociations but also to invite you to consider your disconnection from Nature, from Inspiration and thus from wisdom. Heart-drama is offered as a way to come to our senses. At core, it is an exploration of the nature around us and within us. When these realities are hidden, boxed away, cast from awareness in the demands of our materialistic, technological society or other Big Stories, we remain traumatized and traumatizing to those we wish to embrace. We are fractured from the Inside-out and the Upside-down and need to do Work to awake from the trance, to hold what we have pushed away, to reclaim our rich complexity, to appreciate with gravity our worst ego pursuits, success myths, and the technocratic delusions of unending Progress. As Carl Jung comprehended, when cutoff our internal discord amplifies, the conflicts distort us. The disowned (Shadow) is projected. We see devilish forces everywhere, and so we remain on guard, preventing repair by our vigilance, remaining split and unconscious.

Awakening through a deliberate process interrupts the machine. Spontaneity is restored as our natural state. Heart-felt energies are now available, allowing us to dance with the fullness of life; creativity opens doors to our Inspired possibilities. However, also, (this needs to be understood), such an awakening humbly sits us next to our imperfections and our animal limitations, our flaws and our suffering.

Dissociative Complexes

In the Fallen World, dissociation is normalized. In these lands, it is common to speak of divided-attention or multitasking or compartmentalization as a highly positive “skill.” Putting life domains into silos supports the Abnormal utilization focus. It comes with rewards and hits of dopamine of affirmation, self-reassurance, and material success while ultimately disallowing what is True and Beautiful.

Whereas the unmeasurable processes we have named Play, Love, and Work have intrinsic meaning and power us to reflect our moral center, Fallen states are like powerful magnets attracting chaos, splitting our core, until dissociative numbing can feel like a solution for a moment, but injuries are just walled off. They do not in fact go away. In contrast, the Inspired Heart maintains a healthy distance, the way an opposite magnetic pole pushes back, resistant to undifferentiated merging or collapsing, not to compartmentalize but to maintain a dual awareness, to remain creative, to keep a conscious space open.

 Unaddressed internal conflicts amplify into what Carl Jung called “complexes”—groups of interconnected ideas and emotional states of various length and breadth and domination over us. They evolve into animating and driving energies that I will call Playing at Love, contrary to unconditional love; Working for Love coalesces around the belief we are not OK, and so we “get it” that we must prove we are lovable; Working for Power derives from the embodied sense that we judged to be No OK. In response we strive to prove that we are extraordinary, but, as soon as we reach a summit, then it all recalibrates and the goal extends ever farther; Playing at Power is fostered by a culture that sees nothing but appearance and promotes insanity and hubris.

Humbling

When I first entered the helping field in the 1970’s, I was captivated by The Structure of Magic written by Neurolinguistic Programming (NLP) wizards Richard Bandler and John Grinder. It completely changed the way I thought about healing, growth and change. They called themselves modelers, as they researched how extraordinary therapists and hypnotists were able to achieve “magical” results. They sought to extract the essential patterns that were useful. Their theory posits that we do not interact directly with the real world but rather through internal presentations shaped by neurological, social and personal filters. We can detect errors in subjective maps by noticing over-generalizations, deletions, distortions, universal qualifiers etc. Their meta-model distinguishes between the surface map and a deeper structure (a fuller representation of reality), which led to the familiar statement “the map is not the territory.”  Limitations in the surface structure of our language contributes to our inability to see all our choices.

With this approach, the practitioner questions the client’s statements to uncover what has been omitted, to challenge distorted perception and presuppositions (assumptions that are taken for granted). This helps correct and update the maps and provide more freedom.

Earlier I mentioned there are forces that we cannot see, because evolution has given us an apparatus so we can move around in the world with certainty, but the biological headset is necessarily limited. Add the idea that there are language maps that we live in, rather than “reality,” and then imagine each person has developed through experience their own individual structures that operate automatically but always with some distortion, limiting the meanings made and the choices identified, we may start to feel less hubris and to seek more flexibility as we operate in the world. Interrupting the trance state (automatic pilot) is necessary if we are to get to a fuller experience, encountering a deeper or higher or more complete understanding.

Why is all that important? Because the characters I am going to describe next are stuck and circumscribed, yet they will deny it, minimize, distort, presuppose they know what is correct, what is right and wrong, what is dangerous or not, what is possible or not. Whereas Inspired creations of the human form (Child. Artist, Lover, Visionary) live in a state of curiosity, spontaneity, growing artistry and love, naturally seeking out the portals that heal our wounds and grow understanding, these Fallen personalities will tell you that there is no way to authenticity. Or assert that they are authentic, even as they act robotically, without generosity, humor or affection. They will tell you that Beauty is an archaic notion. It is not scientific. Or not important, potentially dangerous to a reasonable mind, or just trivial; or it at best is something childish (meaning weak and ridiculous), a nice that we left behind in kindergarten.

Jungian Archetypes

This process of coming to terms with the Other in us is well worthwhile because in the way we get to know aspects of ourselves, expression of the inner mind is the point, Coming to more awareness is about the energy forms around you is the point. Jung, Mysterium Conjunctions

What I am presenting as characters in this next section I believe are related to the foundational patterns and images that shape human consciousness. This is in line with Carl Jung’s theories of the archetypal basis of mind. Archetypes are rooted in the collective unconscious, a basin of shared primal themes, symbols, and motifs passed down through generations.

When we are living dissociated from Inspiration, then archetypes influence us without our conscious knowledge, shaping our inner and outer worlds and creating and unleashing characters with limited insight. Energy forms manifest in “personalities” that are unique and personal to us, yet are also emanations of a universal unconscious, energy forms that are Barriers to wholeness and self-actualization Inside-out and Upside-down. The danger is that we can become blended with fragmented actors, channeling their thoughts, feelings, and behavior.

In this alien landscape

Jung proposed the concept of individuation which is a process of integrating the various aspects of the psyche, including the archetypal elements. I believe Heart-drama leads us toward individuation. It is a process that helps us recognize all of what is in and around us.

The World Soul/Spiritus Mundi

Surely the Second Coming is at hand.

The Second Coming Hardly are those words out

When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi

Troubles my sight: somewhere in the sands of the desert. 

        W.B. Yeats, The Second Coming

In Yeat’s conception, Spiritus Mundi refers to the “World Spirit” or “World Soul,” a shared universal consciousness much like Jung’s collective unconscious. It serves as a wellspring of images, symbolic knowledge, and Inspiration, and is the source of creative energy.

In contrast, dissociated from the World Soul, masks of the Fallen world are the antithesis of the Awakened Child, Artist, Lover and Visionary; they are personifications of ego-need and a deep sense of lack. As such, we cannot expect them to access wisdom or to understand subtle matters

Cultural Conserve

In Jacob Moreno’s role theory, the concept of “role conserve” refers to the norms, expectations, and patterns that we learn within our society or culture. We observe and internalize particular ways of thinking, feelings and behaving, our repertoire of familiar roles. When we become inflexible, lacking the Inspiration to spontaneously role-play, one danger we face is that we can become an Android. This is the personification of a psyche applying what it knows rather than attempting to vulnerably connect. Since machines resist letting go of the known conserve, refusing to engage in new ways when this is psychologically and relationally necessary, this results in power-plays (rather than Powerful-work)..

 Standing Reserve

In Martin Heidegger’s philosophy, the concept of standing reserve refers to the dehumanizing way in which technological-solutionism and futurism dissociates us from our deeper needs. We view nature and human beings are mere resources or “reserves” to be utilized for efficiency and productivity, no longer valued for inherent qualities or being. Such a perception reduces the complexity of life (eventually all of life) to a commodity to be fed into the machinery of materialism, unrestrained consumption, and enfettered technology.

The Quantum Metaphor

            Allow me to strain a popular metaphor here. Some physicists and theoretical thinkers describe 2 universes existing at the same time: the quantum field and the Classical cause-effect model that in our headset we call reality. They are both real, but they operate very differently. What is not completely understood is how the “superposition” of the quantum state (seeming to be in more than one place and manifesting simultaneously as different properties e.g. particles exhibit wave-like behaviors) transitions to something we can measure and seems to have a definite state and position. The phrase used to depict this shift is a collapse of the wave function, which to my limited understanding means the many possibilities become a fixed property when there is a conscious observer.

            I find this intriguing as a description of Heart-drama work. We Enlarge and we X-pose until we enter a symbolic world that can support many interpretations. To the observer, the one becomes many. For a time, the conscious mind wanders within the unconscious, and we encounter patterns, motifs and powers, the Inspired and the Fallen. We may spend an hour or more in this sacred space until there is a collapse, until there is a transition. We arrive back at a certain state. A definite position. The other world that is so strange to us, that operates by acausal or even unknowable mechanisms of the surplus, suddenly echoes in our usual (Classical) perception of reality. There is a crumbling back from the quantum field of the unconscious to our life in space and time.

The Colonizer mutates back into our ambitious brother. He is not of course this archetype, but we now see him in a new light. The Artist becomes a style of Being that we have felt in a mentor and, at times, mirrored in our own psyche in flow. The Destroyer is supplanted by a specific politician who haunts the world stage and dominates the media, providing us with more penetrating mindsight into dangerous currents of history rushing like a winter river.

In this Works, we glimpse a bit of the interwoven nature of existence while, too, the collapse into personal meaning moves us back to a human level where we can understand what has happened to us concretely enough that we can make decisions, perhaps make different decisions. Back in this reality, with an increased inkling of what lies beneath the appearance, now we can convey our intent and act with free will.

            In this ego-dissolving work of Imagination, we finally can figure out how important we are. And we are not that important. Of course, the conditioning Inside out and Upside down doesn’t want to be humbled. That is blasphemy. It wants you to get with the holy programming, to dissociate from the Inspired intelligence, demanding you connect back with the mind, to play out the drama as if your life depended on it, energized by the neuro-gravitational pull rippling out into 3-dimensional space.

Eight Energies of the Fallen World

What such a universe suggests to us is resignation, acceptance of what is, approval of what is predictable, fear of what is unpredictable.

Northrup Frye, Fearful Symmetry

 

Though there are many versions, other disguises of lost and wounded energies , I will envision some characters (forms) of the Fallen World that repeat in Heart-dramas. I think you will recognize many of these personalities from the Inside-out and Upside-down. In my early life, I believe I lived primarily in the Burdened and the Outsider and was capable of befuddling and injuring the women I tried to love, especially my first wife. A psychiatric nurse I befriended at the time, who looked remarkably like the inventor of Gestalt therapy, Fritz Perls, told me that he never knew “who” was going to show up when he saw me next, which incarnation, which disguise would be at the doorstep. He was essentially noticing my chameleon-like fragmentation common to those who have been injured in childhood.

What do all these characters have in common? More than anything, they act as Barriers to our best lives because they are dissociated from our right-hemisphere generated human capacities: insight, appreciation of subtlety and nuance, humility, compassion, empathy, heart-felt passion, creativity, transcendent knowing (to name a few).  In the following pages I will depict: the Outcast/Burdened, the Worker/Addict, Colonizer/Android, and the Destroyer/Shopkeeper.

Outcast Inner/Individual Fragmentation Overt Enactment of Avoidance Fallen Energy of Playing at Love	Workaholic External/Individual Fragmentation Overt Enactment of Busyness Fallen Energy of Working for Love
Destroyer Inner/Relational Fragmentation Overt Enactment of Cruelty Fallen Energy of Playing at Power	Colonizer External/Relational Fragmentation Overt Enactment of Selfishness Fallen Energy of Working for Power
Burdened Inner/Individual Disguised Enactment of Helplessness Fallen Energy of Playing at Love	Addict External/Individual Disguised Enactment of Isolation Fallen Energy of Working for Love
Shopkeeper Inner/Relational Disguised Enactment of Grandiosity Fallen Energy of Playing at Power	Android External/Relational Disguised Enactment of Superiority Fallen Energy of Working for Power

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[i] Eckhardt Tolle, (libquotes.com)

 

[ii] Allan Schore, “Playing on the Right Side of the Brain, Interview”, 128

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[iii] Hovel, p 19